“Real” Estate Entrepreneur

Attention: Charleston Real Estate Investors

I was just wanting to give you my thoughts on how we operate.  I was writing this to talk with some prospective members as we begin to grow.  It is a compilation of what I have learned to be some of the best attributes as well as some of the things that I want in people.  Being a part of our team is far beyond a job or working for someone.  Here are some of the things that I wrote down

Start off by saying that the prospect is probably not a match for our team.  We need to say this because we are in need of certain types of people.  Most people wont fit into our team and there should be no hard feelings from the beginning.

This is not a job, it is a lifestyle.  Now I dont expect people to do this at the level that my wife and I do because sometimes we go a bit too far.  I do expect members to enjoy what they do and want to do whatever their role is.

Everyone wins, we never take advantage of sellers – Simple as that, we dont work a situation that is not a win-win.  We dont need the negative brand and we dont need the bad karma.  Obviously, everyone can’t  benefit at the same level but everyone will benefit when working with us or we will not work the project.  Everyone will also be in agreement that they are benefitting.

We think and act, out of the box.  We are innovative because we are free to try different things and try to stay away from the status quo.

Take great pride in this brotherhood.  Being a member is a great honor as well as responsibility.  This is a brotherhood of people that care and that will care about you.

Business isnt about money, it is about helping.  We believe that money comes and helping is the true benefit.  We dont lower any prices or anything like that and we have continuously made plenty of money in real estate.  As long as you help, you will receive what you deserve.

We always carry the attitude that we are the best at what we do.  We may not know everything but we know someone who knows that so we can proudly believe and proclaim that we are the best at what we do.

No negativity at all.  We believe that the thoughts that you originate actually dictate your life.  This is true per the reticular activating system of the brain.  It is basic psychology.

Pride, determination, ambition, loyalty, confidence, among other honorable attributes unparalleled by others.  These are standards that we have of our members.

We continuously strive for personal growth, we are always learning and expanding our horizons.

We enjoy the challenges of life as well as the victories.  The challenges in life are what make us grow.  We are then stronger and wiser and we look forward to these times.

We are all accountable for our actions.  Regardless who tells you to do something or not to do something.  You are accountable for your actions.

We follow intuition undoubtedly.  We believe in those “just a hunch” moments and try to live them.

then I get into

What we do

How we do it

How to negotiate

Those will have to be in later blogs

Tags: charleston real estate
Posted in Experience, Motivation, Personal Growth | | No Comments »

Good Friday Charleston! 

Although our brokerage is in its infancy, we have been an established Real Estate Investment Company for quite some time.  We are building a successful name for ourselves here in Charleston, SC.  In a previous post, Joey mentioned that we are currently seeking help to locate some new properties.  We are finding less time to devote to the most important task in Real Estate Investing; PROSPECTING!!!  We are recruiting and interviewing new candidates immediately. 

It is very important to have excellent organizational skills when running a Real Estate office, or any office for that matter.  I’m not talking about having labeled bins and paperclip holders, although being tidy is equally as important to remain efficient.  When I say organization, I mean having goals and priorities in place and implementing them. 

First, develop your strategy.  A strategy is a coherent set or plan of personalized actions designed to push your intentions in the right directions.  I like to think of it like this:  You can know the name of all the streets in town, but without a map; how will you navigate through them.  Think of your strategy as a Roadmap For Success.  You must communicate all aspects of your strategy to every member of your staff.  In our office, we have a giant dry erase board that clearly states the goals and necessary duties required to achieve those goals.  Nothing has been omitted. 

You then want to make absolutely sure that your team knows what your expectations are of them.  Ensure that they fully understand your core values.  We make it very clear to everyone that we do not “hold hands”.  We will try to make sure that our staff has every tool they need and are fully aware of their duties.  But, we do not tolerate or have time for people who need constant guidance.  Maybe that’s wrong for some organizations, but for us, it works. 

After organizing your goals and staff, make sure that all of your priorities are in place.  Financial aspects are number one.  If you can’t pay your bills, then you can’t have a business.  Marketing is the next priority.  If no one knows you are in business, you will eventually lose your business to the guy who marketed his.  Then, just be consistent with your strategy and make sure everyone else is doing their part. 

More to come in Part 2…………stay tuned

Tags: charleston real estate, office organization
Posted in Business, Real Estate | | 1 Comment »

First of all, you may all wonder where all of the highly “brain stimulating” posts are derived from.  Yes???  I have to toot on my own horn for a moment for this explanation.  After almost ten years, I am back in college again.  A senior at that!!  I am studying in pursuit of my BS in Legal Studies with the full intent of attending Law School here in Charleston within the next two years.  The class that I am currently taking is just so fascinating and amazingly time appropriate for where my incredible husband Joe and I are at in our professional lives.  I have already learned so much in regards to thinking and the importance of positivity and clear goal setting.  I want to share with all of you the mastery of thought training.  You will find this to be the most important thing you will ever do, and it just may change your life.  

Ok, so back to the lesson at hand.  This week, I discovered that the tools of Critical Thinking are crucial to the organization of your life.  What exactly does it all mean?  We all have thoughts racing through our minds at a constant speed.  But when you leave the thinking to run its own course, it can become biased or even distorted.  Ironically, the entire basis and quality of our life is structured around our minds and our thoughts.  Shouldn’t controlling your mind be at the very top of your priority list? 

Here is a quick checklist for reasoning your thoughts:

1- All reasoning has a purpose; state it clearly and be realistic

2- All reasoning is an attempt at solving a problem; think of this as a mathematical problem and break it into manageable sections and sub-questions

3- All reasoning is based on assumptions; are they justifiable?

4- Identify your point of view and try to look at others as well

5- search for opposing information as well as supporting information

6- draw your conclusion and state the consequences; pros and cons

Seems like alot of steps for just one problem, right?  Sure, but anything that is worth anything requires a bit of work, right?  The point of doing this consistently is that it trains your brain to think logically and not impulsively.  Soon, it will become automatic and you will see amazing results!! 

If you have any questions at all, please feel free to reply and I will be happy to answer

Tags: charleston real estate, thinking
Posted in Business, Experience, Motivation, Personal Growth | | 2 Comments »

Attention Charleston Real Estate – here is an ad I just posted on Craigslist

Needed, check out our website at www.CharlestonRealEstateInvesting.com. and our blog at www.InvestingRocks.com

What we are looking for is someone who will comb trailer parks and low income areas for possible investment properties. You will talk to people, get to know everyone and make new 10 second friends daily. Ideally, this is a good position for a part time Realtor to make up the extra income of the down market. I am turning our investment company into a brokerage and I can probably offer you better splits as well.

I will pay you $300 for every mobile home you find and negotiate, that we buy. Obviously, if we dont buy it, it doesnt count. It does count if I get someone else to buy it. We are also looking to grow our rental portfolio so I will pay a 2% commission to you if you find multifamily properties off of the mls that are a good deal or 50% of whatever I profit from a wholesale. You will also be paid $10 per hour for laborer work while fixing up properties. You will try to find renters for our properties as well as for our affiliated investors. You will be an independent contractor so you must pay your own taxes, the benefit is that I dont take any.

Check out our website to see more about us.

Ideally, you will find one trailer per week – $1200, work 10 days per month laboring -$800, find renters for 3 rentals – $300-$600, one wholesale per month – $2000-$13000 and one multifamily per quarter – $1500-?. At the numbers that we have set as goals you can consistently make $5300 per month. We have the ability to produce just not the manpower. You must want to do this on your own with minimal guidance. We dont have the time to hold hands. All this in addition to your increased commission splits by working with us. What do you think?

Please reply with a resume. No resume, dont waste your time – we are professionals.

• Location: Charleston
• Compensation: $300/ per mobile bought, $10/ hour while fixing up, 10% of renters downpayment, %50 of wholesale, higher commission splits

Tags: charleston real estate
Posted in Business, Experience, Motivation, Real Estate | | 1 Comment »

Alright Charleston Real Estate Investors

So I got a call this morning from a guy that wanted to rent an apartment from me, actually I got a call from two people who wanted to rent from me.  One person had a solid job and wanted to rent the property that I had helped the tenant get her lights back on.  I hope that was a smart decision.  I really believe it was what the universe wanted me to do. 

Since you dont know the situation, I had a tenant that was behind on her rent because she is in real estate and well lets face it, it is slow right now.  She spent all of her money catching her rent up with me.  I accepted it and went on my way.  I then called to get my name added to the electric bill so that my daughter could go to a better school district.  I found that the power was off.  This woman paid me every last cent she had to catch up on her late bills that she had her power turned off.  I then decided to loan her the money to get her power back on.  We will see how it goes from there.  Especially since I had a woman talk to me today that wanted to rent it.

Back to the subject though, I love going off on tangents, dont I?  I showed the other apartment today and the people were kind of interested.  I walked upstairs and one of the best tenants, guys that have been there for years wanted to rent that apartment out.  While I was speaking with them, two of my most hated tenants walked down the road.  These people were disgusting, left food everywhere, infested my building with roaches, they were the bottom of bottoms. 

I rented the apartment to the good people upstairs.  It was brothers renting together and one of the brothers wanted to move downstairs.  I was wondering if seeing those bad tenants was the universe telling me that I had finally filled the apartments with all good people and that I had done a good job and a good deed with the renovation and ownership of those apartments.

Tell me what you think.

Thanks

Tags: universe
Posted in Experience, Personal Growth, Real Estate | | No Comments »

Try this:  Imagine you are walking through a busy airport.  What sounds do you hear?  Visualize all of the people running frantically to their gates.  Do you hear a general fuzzy background noise?  Now, imagine that you hear your flight or even possibly your name over the PA system.  Your attention is now jolted and you are now focused on that very sound. 

The part of your brain that is activated by this alert mechanism is called the Reticular Activating System.  It can be compared to a coffee filter that clears out the clutter between the subconscious mind and the conscious mind.  To be more specific, this system takes messages from your conscious mind and delivers them to your subconscious mind. 

So, What the heck am I talking about?

The point of all of this is to show you how you can use your Reticular Activating System to achieve anything you want.  In the airport example, the RAS is telling you to listen for your name to be called.  You can actually trick yourself into believing whatever you want. 

First, you can deliberately program your Reticular Activating System by choosing the exact messages that you send you your subconscious mind.  You can say affirmations and set goals that you repeat daily.  When you say and visualize the things you want, you actually attract them to you.  The opposite is true as well, you can attract things you don’t want just by repeating or focusing on them.  I am a huge fan of Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich.  Napoleon has said that if we keep thinking that we CAN’T achieve a goal, our subconscious will never allow us to achieve it. 

Second, your RAS cannot distinguish between real and fantasy.  This is the best part!  This means that you can train yourself to believe whatever you wish!

Ok, to summarize, tell yourself that you have what you want, you are what you want to be whatever that may be.  You will be amazed at how much better you will feel about yourself.

Posted in Real Estate | | 1 Comment »

Wow!  So how can I start this one, it is definitely difficult to talk about but here goes.  This is for you Charleston Real Estate Investors, we have tried time and time again to make this work and have failed time and time again.  We are trying again as this business is growing much too large to be run just by husband and wife.  My wife, Audrey and I, have been running BSO for the past couple of years and we have undergone quite a few changes.  Not only in our business but in the type of people that we have become. 

About to have a baby and already with a four year old we have asked my unemployed Dad to come down to act as a buyer for us.  My Dad worked with me when I first opened the business during the time I like to call overleveraging and living a lie.  You see when I started I didnt know real estate investment from a hole in the wall even though I thought I did.  I had been a Realtor for a couple of years and thought it was just like HGTV.  After all, that “flip that house” started in Charleston, right?  Well, I was completely mistaken and lost a good bit of money.  He then left and it was down to my uncle and me.  After a while I had to tell my uncle to find another job because I couldnt pay his wages let alone pay my own.  Good thing the military was still backing me up.

We had hired full time crews to labor for us and I was living large.  I was the boss, well that was a short lived dream.  After a while I was max leveraged with a “strong” portfolio and was a “Paper Millionaire“.  That is the worst thing you can be.  The market turned and a lot of that leverage has bitten me in the butt.  Only our apartment complex is doing us a great deal of return and that is because we completely renovated it ourselves. 

This article isnt so much about what we have done as it is working with other people.  A wise investor that I know (woodruffinvesting.com) told me that on your team you want to be the weakest link but you still want to lead.  You want everyone to be better than you at their trade.  I like to be the Jack and work with the Kings.  When working with these people it is important to stroke egos a little bit, but always be in command.  Give people an inch and they will take a mile.  I now have a strong team filled with people that I can count on.  My wife organizes, an attorney who I can ask legal advice, construction experts, other more experienced Realtors and investors.

The problem that I run into is when I try to help out a friend or family.  After all, you have to have some infantry, right?  I believe that I can do something, so should anyone else be able to, right?  Not quite, I have found that people with the employee mindset think completely different.  To remedy the situation, I have tried to stroke one of the buyer’s ego and apologize for giving out too much responsibility.  I think this will force this person to try harder and to own their role.  We are all an integral part of the success and we all must know it.  I just wish I could clone my wife and I a bunch of times.

Be careful with the people on your team.  Make sure to appreciate everyone and tell them good job when you are able.  Have patience and in my case I have started paying production rather than by the hour.  I will take ten independent contractors working 4 hours a week over one employee working 40 hours.

Let me know your thoughts.

Tags: charleston, charleston real estate, estate, investing, managing, real
Posted in Business, Experience, Motivation, Personal Growth, Real Estate | | 1 Comment »

Just like the title says it, I have just begun a campaign to build quite  a web presence.  My thoughts are that if I am able to build a strong enough web presence, my marketing will be more on autopilot.  I would like to get to a point of 100,000 twitter followers, readers, hits to my blog monthly.  I started yesterday and have done pretty good so far.  Let me tell you what I have done so far and what my plans are.

First of all, I went out and bought a couple of books from Barnes and Nobles.  I am sure that all of this information can be found online but I wanted it all in a centralized place.  That seems more beneficial to me than searching the web for half true information.  I bought the book from Problogger, not sure what it is called right now but a great book.  I also bought building a Wordpress blog and Getting noticed on Google.  Havent read all of the last two but basically they are what they say they are.

I was building on the premise that the bigger web presence I have and bigger audience then my real estate business will grow due to leads, I will get more feedback and maybe in the future I can make some money off of pay per clicks on my blog.  I have even been writing a book for about three years with some great stuff in it that Id love to publish one day.  The book is a journal and it is very interesting to see me go from not knowing anything about real estate to where I am now, knowing enough to really get myself in trouble. Ha, actually I am very confident in everything I do now because I have been lower than many people who quit and I have dug myself out.  Also, I have been in the position where I have made friends with the presidents of banks and have made $40k plus in a week.  Back on subject though.

I converted my current free blog into this blog that is hosted and that I have plenty of freedom to change how I want.  I started really getting into SEO and downloaded web ceo as stated in the getting noticed on google.  I learned the importance of keywords (very important), built a sitemap, and did all of that stuff.  One thing that made so much sense to me is to have your keywords in your URL.  My blog is now www.InvestingRocks.com and my website has changed to www.CharlestonRealEstateInvesting.com, I know it is long but a much better site than www.BSOHome.com .  This is because go into google and search for real estate investing in Charleston, what would you put?  I have also learned how to make that logo in the top left corner a link to my business site and add the donations per paypal.  If you wanted to send me like $1, I would be super stoked as I just want to get my first donation.

I also grew from 76 twitter followers to 760 in less than 24 hours.  I started looking at all of these programs you can buy and all of that but all I did and I think it is the best way, is I went onto another investors twitter and followed all of his followers, and then I did it again.  I had twitter set to email me when I get a new follower and after about the first fifteen minutes and 50 new followers I shut that off and left the direct messages on.  My email rejected twitter due to all of the direct messages I got yesterday.  I thought it was pretty cool though.  I asked my new twitter following to look at my blog and had ten new hits within a minute.  I think my plan is starting to work. 

Well, I will be out flying for a couple of days next week and will get all of this stuff up to max capacity and I will let you know how it is going.  Let me know your ideas and please comment.  Talk to you in a bit and thanks for reading.

Posted in Business, Experience, Personal Growth | | No Comments »

For the past few months, we have been putting large payments on our business credit card.  Our plan was to use this card as a Financial Reserve, as the Real Estate Market is so uncertain.  In the Real Estate Investment Business, you can earn an upwards of $40k and then make absolutely nothing the next month.  I’m sure that many of my fellow investors are in the same habit of putting away as much cash reserve as possible “just in case”.   It gives you a certain peace of mind and the ability to continue growing your business in a down economy without any risk of nonpayment for monthly bills and expenses. 

      Tonight, I received an email from this Business Credit Card that despite our attempts at “throwing them huge payments” of over 300% the minimum payment every month, our available credit had been reduced to zero.  I became instantly angered by this as it completely defeated the purpose of creating a Financial Reserve.  I would have simply put that money in a bank account rather than try to pay down a credit card had I known this would happen. 

I fully intend on contacting this company the moment their phones start ringing on Tuesday morning.  I have never felt such disappointment with a credit card company as this one.  Why would they decrease the limit of someone who pays more than they have to?  Has anyone else experienced this recently as a result of the general economic state of the country?

Posted in Real Estate | | No Comments »

Well, I have always thought Twitter was a great program and have been logged in for quite some time.  Recently, I have decided to get some more followers for a couple reasons.  First of all, I am an aspiring entrepreneur and I thought that if I could get a bunch of followers than when I have something to say more people will listen.  I am not going to be a spammer, far from it, but obviously reaching out to more people will help us grow.

I have a lot of good information and am learning constantly.  By having a large following, I will learn more from the quality twitterers like you and in turn continue to grow.  In my life, it is more about growth than anything else.  I feel that as long as I continue to grow in life, I will be successful.

It has been how I have been growing and making mistakes in life that is business.  Hopefully curtailing those mistakes with my new friends will streamline this process a bit.  Twitter seems to be a pretty big deal these days.  I have begun to look at all of these social networking sites in a different manner.  No longer do I see these as popularity contests but I see them as a way to show who I am to the world and expose my dreams.  Here they are, they are yours for the critiquing but also try to learn something from me.

So follow me and check out my blog as we are becoming a great business.  These are real life experiences as they happen.  Help me grow and become successful.  I wont pitch to you or try to sell you anything.  I will help you if I am able to as that is the type of person that I am.

Check it out.

Tags: twitter
Posted in Business, Personal Growth | | No Comments »